Drones take to the air for archaeology in Peru

Peruvian researchers are using customized drones like this one for archaeological and agricultural projects.Ernesto Benavides

Robotic aerial vehicles are on the front lines for combat and security monitoring, but they're also increasingly on the front lines for archaeology and other research.

Archaeologists at Peru's Catholic University are using custom-made drones to help map sites associated with the 1,300-year-old Moche civilization, which pre-dates the rise of the Incas. The ruins of ancient cities lie along the Peruvian coast north of Lima, around San Idelfonso and San Jose del Moro, but they've deteriorated so much that they're hard to make out with the human eye.

Archaeologists say the highest layer of a Moche tomb chamber contained the remains of an individual who might have been a priestess, in a coffin with copper plates and other metal artifacts. Seven other people, including babies and children, were buried in lower layers.

Catholic University's Unmanned Aircraft Systems Group is looking into applications ranging from archaeology to agriculture to public safety. The drones are built by the university's engineers, and equipped with cameras, computers, GPS trackers and other sensors and navigational equipment. They're programmed using Google Maps to fly autonomously and return to base with their data.

"In agriculture, drones allow us to observe a larger cultivation area and estimate the health of the plants and the growth of the crops," Hildo Loayza, a physicist with the International Potato Center in Lima, told AFP. "The cameras aboard the drones provide us with 500 pieces of high-technology data, while with the human eye one can barely collect 10."

Peruvian researchers are using drones like this one, being launched in Lima for a test.Ernesto Benavides

Andres Flores, an electrical engineer who heads Catholic University's UAS Group, said the drones could be used to study wildlife in the Amazon jungle. "Every time an animal goes by, it can snap a picture," he told AFP.

Several issues looms over the development of drones for scientific purposes: For example, many countries are still working out the regulations for the operation of robotic air vehicles. Such vehicles have to be operated safely, so that they don't injure the people nearby — or, for that matter, the ancient sites being mapped. And even though scientific drones aren't nearly as fearsome as the U.S. military's Predators and Reapers, they do raise privacy concerns. To learn more about those issues and how they're being addressed, check out this report in Anthropology News from Austin "Chad" Hill of Christian Albrechts University.